Multicloud – A Reality

Team Simplex

Amazon Quarterly Results

Microsoft FY2Q1 Results

There have been numerous predictions of public cloud becoming a multi-billion industry. Forbes and Gartner, as well as real-world anecdotes, validate these predictions. So do the growth numbers of both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

This means that the cloud service providers, on their part, have done a good job to ensure customers’ requirements are met and their concerns have been successfully addressed. This paves the way for multicloud adoption to have optimised ROI, enhanced security, right levels of latency and performance, autonomy and multi-vendor strategy. This is covered in detailed here.

For progressive organizations that want to fly cloud-ward without placing all their eggs in the same basket, they can do just that: leverage a multicloud environment.

As the next phase of cloud adoption occurs, the key question that now needs to be answered is “how to adopt multicloud?”. I try to list some of the key criteria here.

Application Landscape

The IaaS layer from all cloud platforms – including private cloud – can support a wide suite of applications, either via Operating Systems or Containers. But the overall TCO, including software license and performance, will imply a specific cloud type.

For example, running an Oracle VM in many cases will be as cost-effective as running on Oracle Cloud.

Granularity

Every cloud environment has multiple options in its service catalogue – which means choice-of-plenty. However, it can all stack up the cost of procurement and management.

One should explore the services to be migrated for criteria like resilience, performance, latency, storage, backup, high availability, RPOs, patch management and security components. Some vendors bundle them together while for others, these must be procured separately. This leads to different cost items and support models.

Skillsets

Migrating to the cloud is not an isolated event. Rather, it includes an ongoing series of activities post-migration – ongoing support, optimisation and expansion. This means that the people managing the environment should be well-versed with cloud technologies as well as wider integration and support components.

This could mean that the critical workloads work on a specific cloud even though it might not be the first choice by other criteria.

These are, of course, just a few starting points. The whiteboard session before one designs cloud landing zones will lead to many more. I encourage you to start this conversation now before you end up buying services from a particular cloud.

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